RFK Jr Announcing That AI Is Now Better Than Human Doctors Shows That He Is a Buffoon Who Is Ruining Trust in American Health Institutions
“If somebody tells you, ‘Masks work, trust the experts,’ AI may tell you otherwise.”
Published Sep 30, 2026 4:02 PM EDT
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. doesn’t trust human doctors, but he does trust AI chatbots — and so should you, he’s using his authority as chief medical spokesperson in the US government to tell the public.
The crux of the health secretary’s recent remarks during his “fireside chat” with vice president JD Vance at the Make America Healthy Again Conference on Tuesday was that AI models are now “better informed” than physicians, empowering ordinary Americans to second guess what their doctor tells them at every turn. AI, he proclaimed, has the power “to free us from medical tyranny,” the New York Times reported.
It’s not an unsurprising line from a man whose distrust of scientific medicine stems from the fact that it disagrees with his crank health beliefs, which range from vaccine “skepticism” to promoting a red meat heavy diet. What’s more illuminating is how the Kennedy scion is explicitly touting AI as a way of undermining the medical establishment.
“One of the things that is going to change is that we’re never ever again going to be able to be dominated by public officials who tell us, ‘Trust the experts,’” Kennedy said, as quoted by the NYT.
“If somebody tells you, ‘Masks work, trust the experts,’ AI may tell you otherwise,” he continued. “If somebody tells you, ‘Social distancing works, trust the experts,’ AI may correct that. And if somebody tells you that a vaccine will prevent transmission and infection, or you need to take it to protect your grandmother, AI may say it actually doesn’t do that.”
At one point, Kennedy claimed that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had personally told him that it would be “malpractice for a doctor to make a diagnosis or make a prescription without at least checking AI.”
Many doctors, it’s true, do use AI tools for taking clinical notes, transcribing patient visits, and even looking up symptoms. One widely used medical AI tool called OpenEvidence is already used by around two thirds of physicians in the US, according to its internal data.
But there’s still significant skepticism over the reliability of these tools among actual medical professionals. A recent paper which concluded, like Kennedy, that AI models were surpassing human doctors drew significant criticism, including from the head of the American Medical Association. The AI scribes that many doctors use, meanwhile, have been caught making up nonexistent medical issues.
Even more worrying is the sycophancy of the AI chatbots that RFK wants Americans to be consulting. The AI industry has worked to make its models less overly agreeable amid numerous controversies over its chatbots allegedly driving some users to suicide, but with enough needling and persistence, someone looking to an AI model to confirm their beliefs can get it to do just that. (A golden example: “urine therapy” practitioners who believe in the healing powers of drinking your own pee have found an ally in AI models, which they’ve egged into reassuring themselves that their pseudoscientific beliefs are in fact completely sound.)
The upshot is that by peddling AI, Kennedy is eroding what little trust that Americans have left in our health institutions — trust that Kennedy, with his peddling of anti-vaccine rhetoric, has had a mighty hand in whittling down in the first place.
Rather than turning to experts for advice and trusting scientific consensus, AI will fragment us into increasingly niche sets of beliefs that are disconnected from reality. And with their proclivity for brown-nosing and making up facts, AI chatbots will exacerbate medical neuroses, trapping people in a cycle of distrust and unaddressed health issues. If you thought that crank health beliefs were bad now, imagine how much worse it will get as medical institutions are continually defunded and undermined — right as AI will tell them whatever quack advice they want to hear.
More on health: America’s Health Care System Is So Screwed That Patients Are Flying to China for Cancer Treatment
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Frank Landymore
Contributing Writer
I’m a tech and science correspondent for Futurism, where I’m particularly interested in astrophysics, the business and ethics of artificial intelligence and automation, and the environment.
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